Climate Change

Baroness Burt of Solihull Excerpts

Monday 14th December 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

My noble friend makes a very good point; we will indeed. We already have the largest offshore wind capacity in the world, I think—certainly in Europe. We are world leaders in that technology and the costs have fallen massively. We will be conducting another contracts for difference auction shortly, and I think we will see even more ambitious progress. The targets have been set out and the money provided, and we are well on the way to meeting them.

[Baroness Burt of Solihull (LD) [V]]

My Lords, the Committee on Climate Change must be congratulated on producing a detailed achievable road map to net zero by 2050. It is now up to the Government to put in place the right policies to give investor confidence to the private sector and get the money flowing. When will the Government deliver the investment road map?

[Lord Callanan (Con)]

We only received the report from the committee a few days ago and we will be studying it carefully. We are providing lots of investment in this area. We have the Prime Minister’s 10-point plan, delivering something like £12 billion of public investment and hopefully leveraging three times as much private money. We have investments in the green homes grant and a number of other schemes, so we recognise the challenge. As I am sure the noble Baroness will recognise, public finances are quite tight at the moment, but I think we have an excellent record of providing the money to meet our ambitions.